The Edmonton Oilers hire the most experienced and successful general manager in the league at $5 million a year. And with the first pick of the Ken Holland era in Edmonton, the eighth selection overall, the Oilers long-suffering and venomous fan base was distressed.

The idiot went and picked a player ranked lower than eighth on many published lists and mock drafts?

Holland was even characterized as having put himself “on the hot seat” with his first ever Oilers draft pick.

It wasn’t just the social media haters and internet trolls. The reaction was decidedly that of disappointment throughout a significant slice of the passionate fan base.

This is in the wake of going with the rankings and ratings in the recent past and picking Nail Yakupov and Jesse Puljujarvi.

Now the Oilers have the recently successful amateur scouting and development pair of Keith Gretzky and Bob Green working under the draft and development champion of the NHL, in Holland. And an inordinate number of Edmonton fans call him out for his first pick?

Credit Holland for the best quote of the draft.

“The people who don’t watch the games seem to have all the answers today,” he said.

Holland’s first-round pick of Swedish defenseman Philip Broberg turned out to be telegraphed at the season ticket holder event before he headed to Vancouver. And now with the seven rounds of drafting now complete, you can see his entire strategy in place.

Holland added one more top talent to the Oilers collection of defencemen to virtually insure that a first-rate NHL defence will develop for the big picture here.

Adding Broberg to the collection of Evan Bouchard, Dmitri Samorukov, Caleb Jones, William Lagesson and Ethan Bear battling their way to join Oscar Klefbom and Darnell Nurse and you have to figure it’s going to develop into a special bunch.

In today’s hockey one of the most prized possessions is a big, fast, puck-moving defenceman. How many knowledgeable Edmonton fans have been lamenting the need for a skilled, fast-skating, puck-transporting defenceman for the last several years?

And Holland snags a 6-foot-3 kid who hasn’t even had his 18th birthday, has great speed and he’s on the hot seat?

Take a pill, people.

Holland is going to be able to make a lot of moves now to find the missing pieces up front to go with Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.

To pull this off, he’s going to need other GMs coming to him, willing to trade forwards for the likes of Adam Larsson, Andrej Sekera, Kris Russell, Matt Benning and others in the organization. The moves will be there to make but they’ll be made on Ken Holland time, some in the coming day, some in the coming months and some in the coming years.

It was almost laughable the way it played out on Day 2 of the draft.

Whatever was involved in the Oilers picking Broberg way before his consensus expectation in the first round, it was the opposite Sunday morning when Edmonton used their 38th overall selection to choose 19th ranked, 6-foot-4 right-hand shooting forward Raphael Lavoie, a 20-goal-scorer in 23 playoff games with the Halifax Mooseheads in the playoffs. He also had five goals in five games at the U-18 Worlds and won the Mike Bossy Trophy as the top pro prospect in the QMJHL.

So the Oilers shouldn’t have selected an over-rated player that everybody else had soured on?

You can’t have it both ways.

There are now so many lists out there and so many hobby draft self-proclaimed experts, almost none of whom have actually eyeballed most of the prospects, that this whole draft business for fans has evolved beyond Bob McKenzie of TSN polling 10 scouts and producing his list.

TSN even pays Craig Button to operate as a full-time scout. He was here for the Hlinka-Gretzky in August and in Sweden for the recent U-18 Worlds. He ranked Broberg seventh and Lavoie 17th.

The idea is to project players who will be good NHLers in three or four years, and if you get two of them, it’s been a good draft. I expect this will go down as a good draft for Holland, Gretzky and Green.

Especially interesting was the selection of KHL Rookie of the Year goalie, 20-year-old Ilya Konovalov, with the third pick at 85th overall with Yaroslavl Lokomotiv, where Craig MacTavish will be coaching this year.

The odds obviously drop dramatically the deeper you go, of course, and who knows with forwards Matej Blumel at No. 100, Tomas Mazura at 162nd and Maxim Denezhkin, who will also be playing for MacTavish in the KHL next year, at 193rd.

The bottom line is it’s about drafting AND development and that’s Ken Holland’s wheelhouse. So sit back, relax and watch him do what he’s always done best.

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